Lighting a supermarket

[illia]

I´ve just been told of a new commertial I have to shoot and it´s possible we have to light a shot in a supermarket. I was wondering how to light such a big area, thinking about an easy way to do it as it´s going to be a low budget shooting... I wonder if the only way to do it is to cover all the practical fluorescent lights with minus green (but I think it´s a bit too much time for the stablishing shot, and I wonder if we can fix it in post) to match it with our lights, or add plusgreen to ours to match to those on location... but I really think that real fluorescent lights must have a big range of colors and it can be a mess trying to use them... Otherwise I´m thinking about using big soft sources but I think it can be difficult to make it look realistic...

 

[Kevin_Zanit]

Assuming the market does have cool white florescent tubes, the easiest thing to do would be to gel your lights with plus green and then either use an FLD filter to cancel out the green or correct it out in post. Both methods work pretty well.

Then all you are doing is supplementing the supermarkets existing lights with your own.

Kevin Zanit

 

[David Mullen ASC]

These days, 1/4 CTO combined with 1/2 Plus-Green will usually match an HMI to a store's Cool White flos (in theory, Full Plus-Green is supposed to be a match, but most modern Cool Whites aren't as green as they used to be.)

You can also put Cool White tubes into Kinoflos to match.

 

[illia]

Thank you for the answers. Finaly the shooting will be way more easy, only one location, kind of a waiting room of a dentist, they want a modern look... I guess I´ll try them to show me some pictures with modern look so we can talk visually.
This is going to be my first work using super 16 and I´m nervous... up to now I´ve been working on digital and only touched film on still photography, where you´re alone. Now I´m going to work with a very experienced crew wich is great (and scaring.. in a certain way)
I have to shoot with fuji stock and I thought about using a 500t emulsion, but I wonder about the grain...so I thought about overexposing 1/3 of step or so to avoid graininess... nevertheless I think that if it´s supposed to be released only on tv the grain of this emulsion doesn´t seems to be a big issue isn´t it?
The scene I have to light looks easy, we haven´t finished the locations but I guess it will be a normal room... with two characters speaking. I would like to make it look special so I´m thinking about the use of different lenses as a tool of telling the story (one character looks nervous, so I´ll use a wide lens and shot it a little from above the eyeline) the other character looks pretty stable and confident (so use of tele while keeping the frame size, and shot from below the eyeline)... but I´m not sure of how those will intercut...